The Fates Divide (Carve the Mark #2)(90)
Suddenly I needed to be alone. I slipped away, into the stairwell where I had first showed Akos that I could control my currentgift. My back against one of the stone walls, I slid to the ground and let the tears come.
Later, Teka found a bottle of fermented fruit juice in the cabinets of someone who had lived in this place before it was destroyed, and we all took a glass together to steady ourselves before we tried for more sleep.
Sifa offered a toast, translating to Shotet from Thuvhesit: “To what we have done, what we are doing, and what we will do.”
And I drank.
CHAPTER 46: AKOS
HIS OTHER MEMORIES OF grief involved time slipping away. Oil beading on water. The sudden lack of presence in his own life, the self-protective drifting.
He wished he had that now.
Now, he felt every tick and every hour. Vakrez had come by that morning to a dead-eyed stare, closed his fingers over the pulse in Akos’s wrist, and left. Vakrez’s hands were cold and clammy and then gone.
A few days passed before he was summoned to Lazmet’s side again. This time he was brought to the Weapons Hall, the place where he had first learned his fate. Of course, it wasn’t really his fate, but he had carried it around for seasons anyway. Don’t trust your heart, that fate had told him, and he’d hated it for that reason.
Now, he thought it maybe had a point.
Lazmet was staring at the wall of weapons, tapping his chin. It was like he was picking out a cheese, Akos thought, and he wondered if he was about to experience some kind of new horror, in which his own father systematically broke his bones or carved out pieces of his flesh. It seemed like the kind of thing Lazmet might do. Out of curiosity.
It wasn’t until she moved out of the shadows that he saw Yma was there. There was a warning in her stare, when she gave it to him. And then her mask was back on, that enigmatic smile, the elegant posture. Knowing what he now knew about her, he recognized that she would never be comfortable this way, in a gown, in a manor, playing games with royalty.
“Thank you for your report, Yma,” Lazmet said. “You can go.”
Yma inclined her head, though Lazmet wasn’t looking, still spellbound by the wall of weapons. She brushed Akos’s arm on her way out, the brief touch giving some kind of comfort. And a reminder.
“Come here,” Lazmet said to him. “I want to show you something.”
Akos was supposed to be acting like he was slipping into Lazmet’s control, piece by piece, so he climbed the steps to the dais. The room had an eerie green cast to it, light glowing through the row of jars on shelves up higher than Akos’s head. White orbs floated in the jars, suspended in green liquid. Preservative.
They were eyes. Akos tried not to think about it.
“We’re not a culture that keeps mementos. After all, that would suggest we trust in some kind of permanence, and the Shotet have always known that objects, places . . . they can be lost in an instant.” Lazmet gestured to the wall of weapons. “Weapons, though, we allow ourselves to pass down. They’re still useful, you see. So you can trace the history of our family here, on this wall.”
He reached for a hatchet on the far left. The blade was rusty from disuse, the metal handle still cloudy with fingerprints.
“We’re an old Shotet family, but not old money,” Lazmet said, touching his finger to the hatchet blade. “My grandfather killed his way to prominence in our society. This hatchet was his handiwork. He was a weapons maker. Not particularly talented. What he lacked in artistry he made up for in brutality, when he served in the Shotet army.”
He put the hatchet away, moving along to a staff. At each end of it were the mechanisms Akos recognized from currentblade handles. When Lazmet held it, dark tendrils of current wrapped around first one end of the staff, and then the other.
“My wife’s design,” Lazmet said, with a smile that almost seemed fond. “She was not a talented fighter, but she was theatrical. She knew how to be beautiful, and charming, and intimidating, all at the same time. It’s a shame her life was claimed by someone so . . . unworthy of it.”
Akos schooled his features to stay blank.
“I brought you here to eat,” Lazmet said. “On your . . . restricted diet . . . I recognize I can’t completely deny you food. So I thought we might have dinner.”
There was a table on the dais, pushed up against the far wall. It didn’t seem big enough for the kind of grand dinners that Lazmet probably had, but it was long, about the width of Akos’s armspan, and had a seat at either end. Akos thought this was probably all a part of Lazmet’s strategy, forcing him to eat in the greenish light under jars of eyeballs, in full view of all the weapons the Noavek family had used to bleed their way to the top of Shotet society. He was meant to be unsettled by this.
“I’m not really in a position to refuse dinner,” Akos said.
“No, you certainly aren’t,” Lazmet said, smirking as he put the staff back in its place. Near the edge of the wall of weapons was a bell, built into the wall. He rang it, and gestured to the table for Akos to sit down. Akos did, his head swimming. The food Yma had given him was just enough that he felt his hunger all the time. He drank glass after glass of water just to give his body the impression that it was full of something.
The fenzu that usually swarmed in the globular chandelier were half-dead and needed to be replaced. Akos could see the husks of their bodies collected at the bottom of each glass globe, little prickly legs up in the air.